To Innovate, Leaders Need To Empower The Edges

Breakthrough innovation typically comes from the edges. Albert Einstein had published his miracle year papers when he was an obscure 26 year-old Swiss patent clerk. Some of McDonald’s most popular products, such as the Big Mac and the Egg McMuffin, originated with franchisees before getting adopted nationally.

That’s why a lot of management experts advise leaders to spend time on the edges of their enterprise and some, Walmart’s Sam Walton comes to mind, can do that effectively. Most, however, cannot. The problem is that the time spent “out on the edge” has to come from other priorities, such as product development, culture, customers, investor relations and so on.

Often a more viable alternative is to empower the edges to advocate for themselves. Over the years, I have worked with dozens of organizations and I’ve never seen one that lacked ideas nor leaders who want to leverage them. The real challenge is that ideas stay hidden, because few middle or junior employees know how to build traction and move them forward.

The Agile Manifesto Moment

Most of us have seen it happen. A colleague returns from an Agile training freshly “red-pilled.” They’ve discovered the Agile Manifesto and can’t stop talking about it. They’ve seen the light! Everybody needs to stop what they’re doing right now! Everything needs to change!

They’re shocked when their enthusiasm is met with skepticism. In fact, not only do their colleagues not buy-in, they begin to feel as if they are being shunned and isolated. With their ideas about Agile flatly rejected—even ridiculed—they become bitter and complain that the organization has developed “antibodies” against change.

Of course, that’s all nonsense. Organizations don’t have antibodies. What they have is a manager mindset that favors consensus, predictability, and execution. In other words: getting things done. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Successful organizations are designed to serve stakeholders consistently, not to chase every new idea.

The problem is that when we become passionate about an idea, we want everyone else to see it the same way we do. We want to bring in everyone at once and have them share our passion and our fervor. We’re sure that if they all just had the right information, if they just understood it, they would embrace it.

That’s how change efforts end up sabotaging themselves.

Building A Core Team And A Keystone Change

Now imagine that, instead of trying to convince or persuade skeptics, an aspiring changemaker found a few others just as enthusiastic as they were, identified a problem that people genuinely wanted solved and quietly got to work. That’s essentially what a small team at Procter & Gamble did, with miraculous effects.

In 2017, John Gadsby and two colleagues in Procter & Gamble’s research organization spotted a persistent problem. Although cutting-edge products were being developed all around them, the processes at the 180 year-old firm were often antiquated, making it sometimes difficult to get even simple things done.

They chose a single process, which involved setting up experiments to test new product technologies. It usually took weeks and was generally considered a bottleneck. Leveraging digital tools, however, they were able to hone it down to just a few hours. It was a big accomplishment and the three were recognized with a “Pathfinder” award.

Every change starts out with a grievance, such as the annoyance of being bogged down by inefficient processes. The first step forward is to come up with a vision for how you would like things to be different. However, you can never get there in a single step, which is why you need to identify a single Keystone Change to show others that change is really possible.

That’s exactly what the team at P&G did. Once they showed that one process could be dramatically improved, they were able to get the resources to start improving others. Within 18 months, more than 2,500 of their colleagues joined their movement for process improvement, called PxG. Today, more than 80,000 have used their applications platform.

The Science Of Building And Leveraging Small World Networks

Researchers have long established that ideas spread through peer networks, yet the term “network” is often misconstrued.  In management circles, it is often used to describe an organic, unfathomable, amorphous structure. In reality, a network is simply a system of nodes connected by links that form a specific structure.

For practical purposes, networks have two salient characteristics: clustering and path length.  Clustering refers to the degree to which a network is made up of tightly knit groups, while path length is a measure of social distance—the average number of links separating any two nodes. Effective networks, which combine tight clusters with short social distances, are called small world networks.

Once you’ve achieved an initial Keystone Change, the key is to leverage your organization’s small world network structure. Every organization is made up of tightly clustered, functional groups that are loosely connected to other, tightly clustered, functional groups. Science shows that the most effective way to spread change through these networks is by empowering the clusters and moving strategically through the links that connect them.

A key strategy for helping ideas spread is to create co-optable resources—useful assets that others can adopt to achieve their own goals. Then they, in turn, can share them with teams they are connected to, helping ideas ripple outward through the network. That’s how change grows, through tight-knit groups of enthusiasts bringing in others who feel like they do.

That’s how the PxG team grew their process improvement movement at Procter & Gamble. They began by creating simple assets—first a series of ‘how-to’ videos, then practical mobile apps—to make their ideas easy to adopt. Then they built a network of affiliate teams at other research centers around the company. From there, things grew organically, cluster by cluster.

The Innovation Bottleneck You’re Not Seeing

In thinking about social justice, the philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment known as the Veil of Ignorance.  What kind of society would you design if you didn’t know what position you’d occupy in it—rich or poor, Black, white, or brown, gay, straight, or trans? While Rawls was focused on justice, not innovation, the Veil of Ignorance offers a useful model for thinking about how access and influence are structured within organizations.

When coaching business leaders, I often pose a similar question: If a junior employee had a game-changing idea, how would they get it implemented and scaled throughout the organization? How do transformational ideas and practices ideas filter up to the top? For most, the exercise is an eye-opening experience.

The truth is, very few organizations are designed to incorporate new ideas. They’re built to deliver on a specific mission—whether that’s serving customers, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or enforcing laws. But over time, the very structures that ensure consistency and reliability also reduce adaptability. That’s why it’s incredibly hard for an enterprise to be both optimized for today’s mission and responsive to tomorrow’s possibilities.

Yet the situation is far from hopeless. You can equip people with the knowledge and skills to drive change from within, to identify important problems, build a core team of enthusiasts, develop a Keystone Change project and leverage networks to grow scale.

As Rita McGrath has pointed out, change originates at the edges. Leaders, by definition, are at the center with limited access to those edges and limited resources to get there. If you want your organization to be ready for change you don’t just need better ideas—you need better changemakers who can help those ideas gain traction, build momentum and scale to impact.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

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